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The real solution to congestion is to shift cities away from having so much car infrastructure. If you build a car oriented city with gigantic box stores surro

• NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  No; these things have been a plague everywhere, even in cities organized with good public transportation and non car-centric centers.
  • tjoff 4y ago
    Have been, but not anymore. At least here. Now you have to take a photograph when you end a ride to prove that you did it responsible. There are many areas that are marked as slow-speed and many areas that are marked as no-park. The most central parts are entirely no-park with exceptions for dedicated bicycle-parkings. Scooters that are misparked can be confiscated and the company needs to pay a fine to get it back. It took a little while but now it seems to be respected by the vast majority and it has become a decent addition to other public transportation. And I say this as someone who did despise them in the beginning. Lots of other areas to discuss though, such as whether they last long enough to make environmental sense etc.
  • franciscop 4y ago
    This is absolutely not true; look at any cities around Europe, or at Japanese cities, neither of those are "car oriented city with gigantic box stores surrounded by lakes of parking lots". In the case of Japan, life develops around the train stations indeed, where all the shops and entertainment is, and between those stations are the residential areas, so scooters are perfect here. In European cities (smaller) it's normally organized in rings, where most things you'd want to do are within the city center, or around large neighborhoods but also in circles (larger). So you can take a train/bus/cycle/scooter to the center, then going to the different places either walking or with the scooter.
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
      They were talking scooters, they are a huge pain in the ass with people leaving it in the middle of sidewalk, riding like maniacs, often drunk (especially tourists).
      • Gigachad 4y ago
        This is a problem with rental scooters but not private ownership.
• spamizbad 4y ago
  Yeah, it should be obvious that automobile infrastructure can only support a finite amount of density. Once you cross that threshold you either need to halt growth and aggressively downzone OR build infrastructure for alternative modes of transit to absorb the excess.
• insanitybit 4y ago
  Shifting a large city away from having a lot of car infrastructure sounds extraordinarily complex, expensive, and time consuming. I would potentially support it, but surely scooters are cheaper and quicker to implement.
  • lm28469 4y ago
    Sure but one is a step in the right direction while the other adds a pile of shit on top of the existing pile of shit It's like hotfixing a completely broken pile of spaghetti code in prod, it'll save your sunday evening but you're in for 6 months of rewrite anyways
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Every single change to a city of any reasonable size is exactly that hot fix, even if it takes months or years to implement (see: Big Dig). Desiring grand unified "fix everything" projects rarely works wonders, whereas small-scope projects over time can improve things. In many suburbs just building sidewalks and bike paths would improve things tremendously.
  • parineum 4y ago
    > extraordinarily complex, expensive, and time consuming Remove all zoning laws and it takes care of itself over time. Zoning is always "keep [thing people want] away from [place where people want it]". All that accomplishes is putting services that people want further away from them.
  • clairity 4y ago
    the first step, repainting lines on roads to add (ideally protected) bike/scooter lanes, is a large but imminently manageable project that can get done quickly. while that's happening, you direct various agencies to favor bike/scooter parking over cars, perhaps introducing necessary legislation to that effect. the harder and longer changes are removing/reducing over-zealous zoning, deceptive environmental lawsuits, and overly-specified building codes. it won't happen in a few months, but a lot can happen in a few years for a motivated electorate.
• colinmhayes 4y ago
  Obviously this would be the optimal solution, but we have to operate in the realm of reality. There is no political will to eliminate car centric infrastructure.
  • alistairSH 4y ago
    There's some will. DC metro is seeing changes. More robust bike lane networks downtown. More bike lanes in the suburbs. More mixed use development near transit hubs (with underground parking or limited parking).
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      In select northern cities sure, not in Atlanta.
  • acdha 4y ago
    Eliminate, no, but car infrastructure ensures tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-altering injuries every year, bakes in climate change (even EVs are considerably worse than every other option), and it costs more than the alternatives – enough so that many cities and almost all suburbs struggle with maintenance and cuts to other services. The combination of those factors make me more optimistic than I’ve been in the past that we’ll see a shift away from the 20th century “one person, one car, every trip” mentality. We don’t need to eliminate cars, simply not subsidizing them at the expense of everything else would yield huge health, pollution, and quality of life improvements.
  • munk-a 4y ago
    In the 1970s the Netherlands looked much like any slice of America you could randomly choose - that political will might be impossible in America, I'm genuinely uncertain if the hole has been dug too deep at this point, but in a more healthy political environment it certainly can be done... but it isn't easy.
• yupper32 4y ago
  Why is it always framed this way? This is NOT the solution. The solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt. The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.
  • soperj 4y ago
    > Why is it always framed this way? This is NOT the solution. Because it's the actual solution. > you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt. You don't have to hope. They will adapt.
    • DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
      Ah yes the progressive strategy: make lives miserable for people to force them to adopt your worldview. The only thing it seems to do successfully is lose them elections.
      • burtness 4y ago
        I mean this is basically all politics - who should suffer and how much to keep society running. I don't think you'll find a progressive monopoly on that
    • jgon 4y ago
      No they wouldn't. They would take to the polls and vote in a city council that would reverse whatever sort of plans you think would be implemented. A lot of people seem to think that they will just be able to force a majority of people to join them in bike heaven on the other side of sweeping infrastructure changes but there are far too many people who aren't interested in it and won't let it happen. Car driving and the things it enables are valued much higher by a much bigger proportion of the population that many people seem to want to believe.
• ars 4y ago
  No, the real solution is spread stuff around, so that not everyone wants to go to the exact same place at the same time. Residential and business districts should not be a thing. Offices should be located right next to houses. (With the exception of "roudy" or loud places like music halls and bars.)